A novel technological approach to vector graphics (“Vector Graphics Complexes”) | Hacker News Reader

A novel technological approach to vector graphics (“Vector Graphics Complexes”)

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23 pointssimonrepp25 comments

Back in the early 2000s, there was a vector graphics application called Expression, created by Creature House, a small Hong Kong-based company (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creature_House_Expression). They also had a beta of an animation version of Expression, called LivingCels. It had been battle-tested in various local animation studios, and was just getting ready to burst into the market... (dominated, at that time, by Adobe Illustrator and Flash)

Expression was based on the founders' PhD work too: 'skeletal strokes', a really cool feature that allowed painting with complex vector or bitmap strokes.

It reached version 3, then Microsoft acquired the company in 2003, re-wrote the software, got it wrong... and quietly killed it.

Expression had the BEST user interface, was packed with features, and the website was whimsical and unique.

Guess what? It's still available! A free download for Windows, that works perfectly in Wine. It's better than Affinity Designer, and most other vector drawing apps. I would place it alongside Adobe Illustrator and CorelDRAW - except it's more intuitive and easier to use. (Sure, it lacks features, because it's nearly 20 years gone!)

I love this new vector graphics technology. But they have a lot of catching up to do to make a full-featured application. If only their tech could be combined with Expression (a far-off fantasy!), the world would have another awesome vector graphics application.

Wow, this is cool, I had heard of Expression but didn't the whole backstory. I will definitely have to check it out.

And indeed I have a lot of catching up to do feature-wise :) VGC Illustration won't be able to be as feature-complete as Illustrator for a long time, but hopefully the killer features and better drawing experience will make up for it.

I sincerely wish you well! (And I'll back your KS campaign)

I've been entertaining a thought for a long time... to approach MS and ask (very, very nicely!) if they'd be willing to part with the source code for Expression and LivingCels. They're not using it in any way, and these are killer apps which definitely have a lot of life in them yet.

Thanks a lot! Getting the code for Expression could be interesting, although the code is so old, I wonder how useful it would be. Especially modern C++ has changed a lot, sometimes it's nice to start with a clean slate.

Amazing, but this really should be a web-based app and not desktop based. Or a hybrid strategy where the desktop-based app is actually running JavaScript in an Electron shell or something.

Please switch your approach ASAP or you will be beaten by a web-based app that does this exact thing, someone else will be the Figma to your Sketch.

This specific use-case doesn't require the large amount of resources that would necessitate a desktop app.

Thanks for the comment, I'm the developer of the app! Having it run in a browser would clearly be convenient, but unfortunately Javascript is really too slow. I even wish C++ was faster.

Rendering the vector paths requires the same type of heavy computation as a modern AAA game, and we don't see AAA games implemented in Javascript for good reasons. The paths need to be tessellated, sent to the GPU, then the different layers need to be composited, and all of this takes computational resources.

In addition, unlike Figma where the vector paths are created by manipulating control points, in VGC Illustration it is expected that the paths can be created by sketching them, hand-drawn. This requires extremely low latency and high FPS for the drawing experience to be any good. There's already quite a bit of lag between the stylus and the shown stroke even in Photoshop, you don't wan't this to be any worse :)

I hope this makes sense.

I think you can tessellation on the CPU in an adaptive fashion (e.g. based on curvature or similar) and update that on a per frame (add, remove tessellation points) basis rather than re-tesselating from scratch each frame. The tessellation would just have weights from each control point.

You can modify the vertices on the CPU, update the tessellation points and update those to the GPU. Get 60fps should be possible even when updating 1Ks of vertices (probably more) per second. Do this for whatever changed using dirty lists or something so you do not update everything to the GPU on each frame. This should be relatively fast if you using ArrayBuffers.

100% this can be done in JavaScript in a very fast fashion. It may only seem like it can not be done if you are doing JS poorly. Maybe people make the mistake of not using ArrayBuffers for everything and that makes it slow. The main limitation in JS is the lack of really great multithreading, but I do not think you need it here.

If you want ultimate speed use WASM for the CPU-based updating of your geometry structures.

Anyhow, you are mistaken in your current beliefs and it will hurt you going forward.

Thanks for all the advice, I know it is well-intended, but unfortunately this late in the project there is nothing that could change my mind anyway. It's too late.

But even if I had to start from scratch, I would still use C++. It is the most-used language in this field for rational reasons, not just for mistaken beliefs. Multi-threading is important, supporting custom pen tablets hardware is important, accessing Metal and Direct3D graphics API is important, being able to use the core as a shared library for command-line tools is important, being able to not crash when another tab makes the browser crash is important (okay, for this I could use electron). Being able to embed a Python interpreter is important (yes, it has to be Python it's a design decision). And we're not talking 1Ks vertices, but millions.

Again, AAA games are not developed in Javascript for a reason. Professional productivity graphics application have the same requirements than AAA games.

Tablets are important, so native apps for tablets makes sense if you think this is the main device people will use. ProCreate, Autodesk Sketchbook, etc. live on the tablet and native makes sense for that experience.

But then do not target desktop. You should target tablets and the pen-based interface on them.

I will also target iPads and Android tablets as native apps, yes. But most professional users use a powerful desktop computer with a Wacom Intuos or Cintiq. Some professional work requires hundreds of layers, and in the context of animation, you're not going to make the next Studio Ghibli animation on an iPad. You need your 64GBs or RAM.

> I think you can tessellation on the CPU in an adaptive fashion (e.g. based on curvature or similar) and update that on a per frame (add, remove tessellation points) basis rather than re-tesselating from scratch each frame.

The GPU’s hardware-implemented tessellation is (a) not compatible enough. It’s OK on Windows because Microsoft requires them for GPU vendors to declare the support of Direct3D 11. On the rest of the platforms, support across GPU vendors varies. And (b) doesn’t help much for 2D vector graphics. The hardware tessellation can be good for terrain, trees, or other triangle meshes in 3D space. Doesn’t help much for these Bezier curves/elliptical arcs for 2D shapes. Especially so for stroked paths.

Counter-intuitively, stroked paths are harder to render than filled ones. The offset of Bezier spline is not representable as another Bezier spline. Also, strokes have more parameters on input: line caps, join types, dashes, miter limit, etc.

> The main limitation in JS is the lack of really great multithreading

Also lack of SIMD. Also, the code in general is slow compared to C++, C# and many other statically typed languages. It’s incredibly hard to generate fast code from very dynamic languages like JS or Python, where everything is a hash map.

> I do not think you need it here.

Here’s my code which offloads CPU-bound pieces of 2D rendering to other CPU cores: https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac/tree/master/Vrmac/Draw/Tes... Multithreading helped a lot.

> The GPU’s hardware-implemented tessellation is (a) not compatible enough.

I am unsure why we are talking about GPU-based tesselation again. I said do it on the CPU in my comment you are referencing.

> Counter-intuitively, stroked paths are harder to render than filled ones.

I would if it could be rendered via a 2D SDF? Similar to how you can do resolution independent fonts/decals via SDFs... basically use a cutoff distance from stroke midline or similar.

> Also, the code in general is slow compared to C++, C# and many other statically typed languages. It’s incredibly hard to generate fast code from very dynamic languages like JS or Python, where everything is a hash map.

The above is 100% incorrect. The trick is to not use slow hashmaps and then your code is near the speed of C++. Use ArrayBuffers instead for everything. I said this in my earlier comment.

> if it could be rendered via a 2D SDF?

I don’t think so. For one, computing SDF is a computationally hard problem.

Another thing, SDF will result in round joins, look at these pictures for available options: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/d2d1/ne-d... That particular spec is for MS Direct2D, but the rest of them offer the same features. Vector graphic formats are old and very stable. Similar story with line caps, SDF will get you round caps but sometimes you need different ones: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/d2d1/ne-d...

> The trick is to not use slow hashmaps

Every JavaScript object has such a slow hashmap, for the properties of that object.

> and then your code is near the speed of C++

JavaScript can only approach the speed of C++ for I/O bound things. For crunching numbers on CPU, the difference is rather large. Here’s some benchmark across many programming languages: https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/ The average difference between C++ and JavaScript is 4x, for some problems it’s almost an order of magnitude.

Two reasons.

1. It’s hard to produce fast code from dynamically typed languages. CPU instructions are typed, different data types need different instructions.

2. C++ compilers work offline. In release builds, C++ optimizer can spend more time optimizing code. JavaScript JIT simply doesn’t have time to do these optimizations.

Thanks a lot Const-me for all your very accurate responses! I basically have nothing more to add.

Oh, and indeed, SDF is just completely irrelevant to the problem at hand here.

I would kindly suggest ninetenfour to avoid making bold statements without more domain experience. JS is great for many things. It's just not the tool for the job here.

SDF 2D fields are fun though.

Give you can create them from any cubic curve and it gives you offsets from it.

https://www.iquilezles.org/www/articles/distfunctions2d/dist...

If you offset in both direction from a curve, you can pick a start and end threshold to fill an outline. This only gives you rounded outline strokes. If you had separable tangential versus normal SDFs you could vary your end cap types.

Now how do you handle an arbitrary set of knots/control points in one shader? That is a separate problems for which there are a bunch of solutions.

Just in case it's useful: You actually can run C++ in the browser these days to do the intensive things, by using WebAssembly (WASM). It can call out to graphics APIs, so it might work for this project without changing the C++ much.

How are you rendering these vectors on Linux?

I'm asking because AFAIK unlike Windows with Direct2D, Linux doesn't have GPU-targeted vector graphics libraries. I have once made my own one when I needed something similar: https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac#vector-graphics-engine

I'm using 3D graphics APIs, OpenGL on Linux currently, but Vulkan will be an option later. I'm converting everything to triangles on the CPU and send to OpenGL.

Note that the animation app actually needs to show 3D graphics for a 2D+time visualization which is part of the innovation in my research.

> I'm converting everything to triangles on the CPU and send to OpenGL

Thanks, that’s what I thought. The library I have linked does the same thing. Only it’s either D3D12, or GLES 3.1 underneath.

Wow, your library actually looks impressive! Yeah, I'm pretty much implementing all the same things.

But why should it be web-based? Why would something else web-based 'beat' this based on that fact alone?

> But why should it be web-based? Why would something else web-based 'beat' this based on that fact alone?

Software distribution and/or installation, presumably.

But these factors mostly apply to the consumer and prosumer market segments (hence, the web triggered the 'consumerization of IT'), rather than to the professional market.

Playing devil's advocate, I'd argue that it does make development much faster, and portability much easier. This is important.

But otherwise I clearly agree with you. There's no reason why I would make it web-based in the first place.

this looks very cool, I've long wondered why vector graphics tools seem to have largely stagnated in terms of features and such.

It is indeed strange, the technology hasn't progressed much, especially compared to 3D modeling/animation! I hypothesize that the stagnation is because researchers in computer science are more naturally drawn to 3D since the problems seem more fun and challenging, and they may not realize there are still things to improve in the 2D world.

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